Project Eighteen: Making my own Car Stickers

A few weeks after painting the Soot Sprites on the car, we added a black and white checkerboard to one side panel. While Mr. B popped inside to make us both a well-deserved cup of tea, I painted one of the squares pink instead of white. I love a little splash of unexpected colour here and there.

After we painted the car, Mr. B mentioned that he would really love to cover the sides of the car in stickers. I had a look online and realised it would cost an arm and a leg to buy enough car and bumper stickers to achieve the look Mr. B wanted, so in true resourceful style I decided to make my own. How hard could it be?

A quick search online and I found what I wanted. 20 sheets of self-adhesive vinyl sticker paper on Amazon (the cheapest supplier of ppd vinyl paper that I found, if you’re interested).

Once I had my vinyl paper I got to word designing the stickers using GIMP. All the stickers have some sort of personal meaning to us, there are lots of climbing-related ones, some vintage adverts, cars, engineering and electronics ones.

My favourite one is The pink sticker on the back that says ‘Powered by Diesel’ in Disney font with Tinkerbell flying over it. Of course it is a Parody of the original ‘Powered by Fairy Dust’ stickers you sometimes see on women’s cars (like this one). I made it because both the boy (who is very literal and doesn’t really get jokes) and Mr. B (who’s an Automotive Engineer) react strongly against the fairy dust stickers whenever they see them, exclaiming things like “actually it’s powered by Petrol/Diesel/an Internal Combustion Engine” etc.

So far we have only used 5 sheets of A4 Vinyl paper to make all the stickers you can see in the photos, and we’re planning on making plenty more as we still have 15 sheets left.

Here’s what you need if you want to make your own stickers:

Self-Adhesive vinyl sticker paper (you can buy it online or from office supply shops, I got mine from Amazon)

A computer and suitable programme to design your stickers (I used Gimp, you could use Photoshop, or even just Word or Paint)

A colour printer

Cutting board and knife to cut the stickers to size once they are printed

All you need to do is design your own stickers, or use images or photographs (the Graphics Fairy is a great source of images) and then fit them all onto an A4 size canvas and print them out. Stick them onto any clean dry surface. The ones I designed have so far survived the wet winter weather and are not peeling away or anything.

*PS If you have a ‘Powered by Fairy Dust’ sticker on your car, please don’t take offence or be insulted by our ‘Powered by Diesel’ one, it wasn’t made with the intention of mocking others, we just thought it would be funny and amusing because of Mr. B’s line of work.